Digest – July 2026

Doctor’s Notes

Summer: that heady season when we retrieve our dusty deckchairs from a cobwebbed corner of the shed, pour ourselves a cold beer or chop fresh fruit for Pimm’s, and don our fraying sunhats for a cryptic crossword al fresco. We ponder preambles and attempt anagrams against a soundtrack of birdsong, the drowsy buzzing of bees, and the cheerful chime of the ice cream van on its rounds. Bliss… – until every power tool and lawnmower within a half-mile radius inevitably starts up.

The long dry days of summer are the perfect time for maintenance work, it seems, and the Clue Clinic is no exception. Despite the heat, the Clinical Data office has been busy carrying out updates and improvements to the lists of indicators. We were happy to hear from one regular visitor that “the recently introduced drop-down filter is a significant improvement that undoubtedly makes life easier for setters”. We changed the pagination settings, so that almost all the lists of indicators are now displayed in full on one page by default, and added expandable notes above each table. Further details of changes made within the lists can be found below.

We also added “lipogram” to the Glossary in response to a suggestion from another visitor. A lipogram is a piece of text from which a particular letter has been completely excluded. The clues for Gemelo 2, published this time last year, formed an e-lipogram. If you enjoyed that puzzle, you may be interested in Mark Dunn’s 2001 novel Ella Minnow Pea, the hardcover version of which was subtitled “a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable”. If you were unfamiliar with lipograms – or you’ve been wondering why Dr Clue was talking about “green paint” in one of his comments on Gemelo 41 – then the aforementioned Glossary (at the end of The Setting Room page) is a good place to look.

Clinical Observations

Our round-up of this month’s Observer barred puzzles:

• Azed 2,781: Plain, 2.5/5 difficulty. Could you see the wood(land) for the (palm) trees? One solver resorted to consulting a 19th-century British gardening periodical…
• Gemelo 40: Special ‘Two truths and a lie’, 3.1/5. Dr Clue was underwhelmed, but Dr Cluelittle enjoyed this offering, where a third of the grid entries were antonyms of the answers derived from their clues.
• Gemelo 41: Plain, 2.6/5. Described by one commenter as “spicy”, this puzzle sparked discussion of second anagram indicators in clues where non-consecutive letters need to be removed from anagram fodder.
• Gemelo 42: Plain. Dr Clue toasted that cruciverbal Marmite, the Spoonerism – but did you love it or hate it? Voting still open – let us know.

Clinical Data Updates

A number of changes to the Clinical Data lists were made during the month. Several of these rectified what in hindsight seem like glaring omissions – such as ‘blocking’ for insertion, ‘constricting’ and ‘cornering’ for containment, ‘shelving’ for expulsion, and ‘not finishing’ for last letter reduction. Some, like the advanced anagram indicator ‘huddles’ (Chambers: ‘crowds in confusion’), are less obvious. Needless to say, our favourite addition here at the Clinic was the containment indicator ‘bandages’. One notable retiree was the anagram indicator ‘assembled’, replaced by its close relative ‘reassembled’.

Historically, the changes to each list have been recorded in the header of the relevant page, but in future all changes will be consolidated in a single table, with the latest updates at the top, so you can see in one place what has changed and when. Also shown in the new change log are candidate indicators which have failed to complete the admission process, along with existing entries which have been retained following a review of their credentials.

Several of the recent changes were prompted by comments from site visitors. We actively welcome suggestions for additions to the lists, or questions about the validity of indicators which are currently included.

Single Letter Indicators

The Clinical Data section of the site has several lists which include direct cryptic indications of single letters (eg ‘minute’ = M, ‘five’ = V), namely ‘All Abbreviations’, ‘Common Abbreviations’, ‘Single Letter Indicators’ and ‘Single Letters in Blocked Puzzles’. The latest guidance from NICE (the National Institute for Cruciverbal Excellence) suggests that this is not best practice.

Our intention is therefore to bring all of the relevant content together in a single list, which can then be viewed either from a blocked puzzle perspective or a barred puzzle perspective, with the markers which are potentially valid for the selected puzzle type being shown as ‘All’ or ‘Some’. To give an idea of how this will work, we have set up two test pages offering the two different views of the list. You will see that we also now have an ‘A-Z’ selector at the top of the list to enable rapid filtering of all the markers for a specific letter.

Single Letter Indicators – Blocked Puzzles

Single letter Indicators – Barred Puzzles

It is our intention that this list, and a similar list for two-letter indications, would replace all the lists mentioned above. If you have any views on the proposed change, please add them to this post.

RUAI?

The anti-spam plug-in that we installed earlier in the year has done a magnificent job of stopping robot-generated spam (over 60,000 attempts blocked so far), but very occasionally a comment comes through for moderation that requires a second look before it is consigned to the bin. The most convincing to date arrived recently (from a credible email address):

“I enjoyed the balanced review of this Gemelo puzzle, especially the comments about the polished clue construction and the careful use of Chambers definitions. The point about the repeated infinitive indicators was interesting too—I probably wouldn’t have noticed that on my own, but it makes sense once it’s pointed out. Reviews like this help me appreciate the craftsmanship behind a puzzle, even when I don’t solve every clue. For a different kind of word challenge, I sometimes visit https://[a games website].”

Out of interest. I asked Claude what he thought about it (they say it takes one to know one), and having agreed that the comment was surely the work of one of his brethren he added that, “The specificity about ‘Gemelo puzzle’ and ‘repeated infinitive indicators’ suggests some genuine familiarity with cryptic crossword terminology, which a low-effort spam bot might not bother getting right.”

Thankfully, the pay-off link at the end invariably gives these (invariably mildly complimentary and distinctly bland) AI-generated comments away, while without such a link they would be entirely harmless.

Poll of the Month

Results of June poll

The question was “To what extent is false addition or removal of capital letters acceptable?”

62.5% of respondents chose the option “I can accept the addition of a false capital, but not the reverse”. The remaining votes were cast as follows:

Anything goes as far as I’m concerned – 12.5%
The only acceptable situation is where a common noun is disguised as a proper noun – 8%
I don’t like to see false capitals being used at all – 17%

This suggests that the majority of solvers are happy with the existing ‘rules’ as they are normally applied by setters/editors of both blocked and barred puzzles, and while Dr Clue is not ploughing a lone furrow in his dislike of the addition of false capitals, he will just have to put up with them.

July Poll

More and more crosswords are available for online solving, including some that have appeared only in print for many years.